I can still taste the sweetness of the toasted garlic. The creaminess of the butter lingers on my tongue, which still feels slightly burned from when I ate that first piece of chicken just moments after it got out of the deep fryer. I couldn’t help it. It just looked so delectable. And it was. That chicken was just perfectly cooked, the meat juicy and so tender I could rip it off the bone and the skin crispy to the bite. And the addition of the Parmesan was just perfect. There was just enough of it to tie the whole dish together.
“If you’re going to keep making that face, I’m going to kiss you,” Jackson threatens.
I turn to him with a look of surprise. “What?”
“Nothing.” He tips his bottle of beer over his mouth and takes a gulp.
I tuck a few loose strands of hair behind my ear. “Seriously, though, the wings were great. I think I ate more than twenty of them.”
“I think you ate twice that many.”
I scowl. “I did not.”
Jackson chuckles.
“Maisie ate a lot, too,” I say. “She said it was her new favorite food.”
“Yeah. I was surprised. I guess she has the same taste as Trisha.”
I smile at the mention of her name. Weird. Not so long ago, I’d freeze each time I heard it. It feels nice that I don’t anymore.
“Maybe you should put it on the menu,” I tell Jackson. “I know it’s too simple, but – ”
“No, not at all,” he says. “Besides, isn’t simple food the best of all?”
“But I thought you were all into that complicated stuff. What was that? Atomical gastronomy?”
“Molecular gastronomy,” he corrects me. “Just a fancy name for using science to make food look and taste better. But that doesn’t mean my food isn’t simple anymore. Actually, my food is simple. Deceptively simple. You see the dish and you think you know it because it looks and smells familiar, and then you eat it and you can tell a lot of work was done to elevate its taste and texture.”
“So it’s not simple at all.”
Jackson grins. “But there are some dishes that I don’t tweak much. I don’t need to. Maybe I can keep the flavors the same but just think of serving the chicken in a more elegant way for the restaurant.”
“You mean so people can eat it in a non-messy way?” I touch my chin. “That sounds interesting. And maybe we can call the dish Trisha’s Wings because calling it Garlic Butter Parmesan Wings just sounds like too much of a mouthful.”
“Thinking like a manager now, are you?” Jackson teases me. “But you’re right. That sounds great.”
“Now it will really be her dish.”
I smile before bringing my cup of hot chocolate to my lips.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know that was her favorite,” Jackson says. “I thought it was beef and broccoli casserole or sticky ribs or pizza.”
“She always got the garlic butter wings when we ate at the diner,” I tell him. “And then she’d grab the bottle of Parmesan and pour it on them. Sometimes the waiter would give us this evil eye.”
Jackson chuckles.
“Sometimes she’d eat it with pasta, sometimes with salad, sometimes even with bread. It was weird.”
“Well, there’s an idea I might be able to use.”
My eyes grow wide. “Chicken wings and bread?”
He doesn’t answer, but I can tell the wheels inside his head are already turning as he takes another gulp of his beer. I take another sip of hot cocoa as well.
“Then again, I’m not surprised you knew her better than I did,” Jackson tells me. “You spent more time with her. Besides, she liked you more.”
“Only because she couldn’t really find things to talk about with you,” I say. “But once you went to college, she did visit you, didn’t she?”
“Yeah. We started having more things in common. She started asking me for advice.”
“See. She loved you.”
“But the two of you were the peas in a pod,” he says.
I can’t argue with that.
“I know, though I still sometimes wonder how that happened since the two of us didn’t really have much in common.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re exact opposites, actually. She’s stylish. You know, she used to layer her clothes and she knew exactly how to do them.”
“Not exactly. She’d stress about that and try different combinations until she found the right outfit.”
I shrug. “I just pick whatever fits my mood or whatever is on top of the pile. Boring, right?”
“No,” Jackson answers. “You were never boring.”
I look away as I suppress a blush.
“And she was always ready for anything. She was the daring one. I was the shy one. She was athletic, outdoorsy. I was bookish. I preferred the cozy indoors. Still do. She liked horror movies. I hated them. I liked classical music. She hated it. She was artsy. She could draw. Her penmanship was much better than mine.”